Nurturing bilingual learners: challenges and concerns in Singapore

ABSTRACT

Singapore’s bilingual policy legitimises English not only as the language of governmental administration and interethnic communication, but also as the medium of instruction in all schools on all levels and across all subjects except mother tongues (MTs). As a result of these politics of language recognition, a visible shift has occurred in all ethnic groups away from MTs towards English. To rectify the language shift situation, the government has emphasised that developing bilingualism and raising bilingual children should begin in preschools. In this paper, we examine two top-down official documents: Review of Mother Tongue Languages Report, issued in 2011, and Nurturing Early Learners Framework for Mother Tongue Languages, developed in 2013. Attempting to identify some of the complex factors that influence language shift, we present an intertextual analysis of the Report and the curriculum Framework. In doing so, we compare the consistencies and locate the implicit inconsistencies in the policy position on bilingual education in preschools. We conclude the article by outlining the implications for changing the current bilingual educational models and providing teacher training programmes that maximise the learning opportunities of young bilingual learners.

KEYWORDS:

• Preschool
• bilingual policy
• curriculum framework
• mother tongue languages
• Singapore

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Xiao Lan Curdt-Christiansen is Associate Professor at the Institute of Education (IoE), University of Reading, UK. Her research interests encompass ideological, policy and socio-cultural-cognitive perspectives on language learning with particular focus on multilingualism and multilingual education. Obtained her Ph.D. from McGill University, Montreal, Canada, she has been actively involved in research projects on topics of bilingual education and biliteracy development in mainstream classrooms, heritage language schools, and ethnic communities in Canada, France, Singapore, Norway, and the UK. She is the guest editor of a special issue on Family Language Policy for Language Policy and an associate editor of International Journal of Learning. Her most recent books are entitled: Learning Chinese in Diasporic Communities (published by John Benjamins) and The Politics of Textbook in Language Education, with Csilla Weninger (Routledge). Her publications have appeared in Language Policy; Canadian Modern Language Review; Cambridge Journal of Education; Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development; Journal of Early Childhood Literacy; Language and Education; English Quarterly; Language, Culture and Curriculum; Sociolinguistic Studies, Heritage Language Journal, etc.

Baoqi Sun received her Ph.D. from National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Her research encompasses biliteracy development from cognitive and social–cultural perspectives and her doctoral thesis focuses on examining the relationship between metalinguistic knowledge and bilingual children's academic performance in Singapore.

Notes

1. Singaporeans speak a multitude of language varieties. The Chinese community has 11 dialects, including Hokkien, Teochew, and Cantonese; the Malays speak Bahasa Malaysia, Bugis, and Javanese; the Indians use Punjabi, Urdu, and Malayalam. These language varieties are not taught in schools as MTs because of the large number of different varieties of MTs. Discussion of these varieties as MT is beyond the scope of this paper.